Lost Bennett/Brubeck White House Recording to Be Released 1962 performance for the Kennedys was thought lost

By Jeff Tamarkin

A previously unreleased album featuring Tony Bennett and Dave Brubeck, recorded at the White House, will be released May 28 by RPM/Columbia/Legacy Recordings. Previously thought lost, the recording presents the complete performance from the White House Seminar American Jazz Concert, held on August 28, 1962.

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Tony Bennett and the Dave Brubeck Quartet at the White House 1962

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Tony Bennett and members of the Dave Brubeck Quartet at the White House 1962

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Tony Bennett in the early '60s

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According to a press release, “With the Washington Monument as the evening’s backdrop--the show was moved from its original Rose Garden location to the larger Sylvan Theater grounds nearby to accommodate the crowd. The concert was an end-of-summer event thrown by the John F. Kennedy White House for college studentswho’d been working as interns in the nation's capital.”

The album is titled Bennett & Brubeck—The White House Sessions, Live 1962

The press release further states, “One of the great lost treasures of American musical history, the Tony Bennett-Dave Brubeck White House Seminar performance came about when the artists—each already on the bill with his own ensemble—agreed to seize the moment with an impromptu set. While the Bennett-Brubeck recording of ‘That Old Black Magic’ had surfaced on the occasional compilation (Brubeck’s 1971’s out-of-print LP, Summit Sessions, and 2001’s Vocal Encounters), the rest of the Bennett and Brubeck performances—an hour's worth of music—were a mythical lost object in the Sony Music Entertainment vaults until finally surfacing through a fortuitous discovery last December, just weeks after Brubeck's passing on December 5, 2012 (one day shy of his 92nd birthday). It would be 47 years before Tony Bennett and Dave Brubeck would share a stage again to make music when they both appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival in 2009 and performed ‘That Old Black Magic,’ one of the standards they’d immortalized in Washington in August 1962.”

Track listing
The White House Sessions, Live 1962

1. Introduction - William B. Williams
2. Take Five
3. Band introduction
4. Nomad
5. Thank You (Dziekuje)
6. Castilian Blues

The Dave Brubeck Quartet:
Dave Brubeck, piano; Paul Desmond, alto sax; Eugene Wright, bass; Joe Morello, drums

7. Introduction - William B. Williams
8. Just In Time (from Bells Are Ringing)
9. Small World (from Gypsy)
10. Make Someone Happy (from Do Re Mi)

11. Rags To Riches
12. One For My Baby (And One More For The Road) (from the RKO film, The Sky’s the Limit)
13. (I Left My Heart In) San Francisco

Tony Bennett
with Ralph Sharon, piano; Hal Gaylord, bass; and Billy Exner, drums

14. Lullaby Of Broadway (from the Warner Bros./Vitaphone film, Golddiggers Of 1935)
15. Chicago (That Toddlin' Town)
16. That Old Black Magic
17. There Will Never Be Another You (from the 20th Century-Fox film, Iceland)

Tony Bennett with The Dave Brubeck Trio